Caught On The Canvas
by AcronymsAnonymous
Summary: Rose has youth troubles.
1. Chapter 1

You grab a pen and a pencil and you look down at a hard-bound book stretched out across the desk in front of you. The first page is blank and open, that's why it's here.

If you could take a needle and prick yourself gently in the chest and draw out your emotions like Dumbledore's memories and drop them to make some kind of painting on the page, you'd do it. Even if the product wasn't something to fully satisfy your ambition, you'd do it anyway, just to get rid of the feeling that's like a ball of red yarn twisting and turning in your stomach. So you would prick your stomach with a small needle and slowly, carefully, pull the yarn out and feel it unravel inside you until it's gone. That's a metaphor well suited to you, if you could take out all of that emotion bubbling and welling and rolling around in your chest and weighing down your arms and use it to make something and create something, that's what you want. Because right now it feels like there are bags of sand weighing you down everywhere and somewhere inside you there it is, the spark and the flame, and it's trying to get out. Maybe it's not a bad feeling, not really, but you need to do something with it, because for you this is creativity.

So maybe you shouldn't name this book, you shouldn't give it any labels. Not a diary, not a journal, because every time you smack a label on a string of thoughts suddenly it becomes a thing. A lot of people underestimate the effort of maintaining things, of keeping things in order, of having them filed and organized under names in the little cabinets you have in your brain. It's fast, it's instantaneous, but you just want to block it with your fist because after it's filed away you don't look at it anymore, it's hidden. And maybe if you don't file it away it'll stay open like a wound for all the rest of time, a sore you never tend to, a seed you plant but never cultivate into something living, but at least that won't be as strong as that feeling of regret that mows you down every time you realize you've snapped the neck of another promise to yourself.

That ball of yarn stashed inside you, not so deep, shallowly planted enough that you could still prick your skin and it would all come leaking out in a brilliant display of red. You wonder why you keep trying, sometimes, you see all the other people in the world and all the things they make and all the beauty you only wish in that moment for you to become. You're a caterpillar, you want to be a butterfly like all those works of art and all those painters, but you have to choose a side of the canvas to be on because it seems like more often than not people kill themselves trying to be both. You want to work hard, you want to do things, you want to empty your heart and soul and spill all that red out into something and let it become your life, but what?

What do you want to do, what do you want to be? Echoes all around you all the time. You're older than you used to be, old enough to make your own decisions where it doesn't really matter and old enough that you're supposed to get lost inside yourself and go soul searching for your destiny, but young enough that all of those pointing fingers with the loud voices choose for you exactly what you want your life to be. And maybe you don't agree sometimes, but oh well, what else is to be expected?

The worst birthday present you ever got was this burden of self awareness, you're a fish raised on land and slowly they eased you into the sea but you've never touched water before so you don't know how to breath it in like you need to. Or maybe you're not a fish at all, maybe you're just a human, and that's the worst part of it all. Realizing every now and then the mass of your arms and legs and the tapping of your fingers when you're trying to think of something to say and how it all hooks up to your brain. Someone somewhere chose to bestow you with the miracle of human consciousness and it's a burden, everything's a burden when you're stuck in the in between.

And here's a map for those who've forgotten what it looks like: A cave that extends into a tunnel and most of the way is darkness and you're standing at the mouth. You'll have to map the way through with your hands and know that each time your fingers touch the wall it'll be something slimy or maybe a diamond that you'll always forget by the time your palm hits the next thing. Behind you is a place you know well but the sun is fading for you and it's time to move forwards and look for the light. You know there's light on the other side but you don't know how you'll get there. Even if there were a mountain you could climb over that would let you see the light at all times, you know you wouldn't choose it, because even if the feeling of each rock in your hand dulls with every breath you take moving forward you know some part of it will cling to you like a magnet and maybe they'll cling to your legs and make it hard for you to walk for a while but the important thing is learning to walk again with them on. It's important, you know that, even if you wish it weren't true.

The pencil taps down on the first page.


	2. Chapter 2

_You write:_

(1)

For a while it has been the time

Where ten fingers and ten toes

Are not all that are needed to construct

A normal child.

For a while it has been the time

When ten, eleven, twelve years

Is not too young to put on a pedestal

Every youth,

And say to them:

If you look up, you can see

The others, where you should be,

So why have you fallen

So far below them?

(2)

One shoe, two shoe,

Red shoe, blue shoe,

Tall shoe, thin shoe.

How many inches

Can you hid beneath

Your feet

Before you're tall enough

To overlook

The fences they set

To block the females

From a man's world,

If that world

Is not a bedroom?

(3)

Elliot had certainly seen some shit in his days,

It hit the fan in wide variety of different ways,

But this is the kind of shit that stays firmly in place,

That rots on the floor and won't look at his face,

When they tell him his grand daughter's hands

Are too delicate to hold a rifle against

Any future man who should have known better.

(4)

Upstairs, I can hear the trembling piano-forte refrain. It's a song with wings, a baby bird that only needs a few strokes before it's ready to fly on its own, and then it does just that. Sometimes I wonder what it's like to get lost in something, to dig your own grave in the sky and bury yourself deep to find that when you roll over you're lost in heaven. Whenever I try to play music, I think I might be digging to slowly and the wrong way, because all it seems to be getting is harder to appear as if I sustain interest and harder to feel amazed by the way the strings hum against the Ebony. The first time I played it was the kind of symphony that would call the dead to dig deeper into their own graves and the strings on the bow I used to play were severely frayed, but I smiled because it was music and I alone had made it. Now there are books worth of lessons filed in my head. I know which three strokes will get me Bach and which four will bring me Mozart but I can't call up the number which will bring me happiness.

(5)

I don't think it's depression, but it's not something I've talked about so I can't know for sure either. The thing that a lot of people seem to forget about being young is that you know you aren't nearly as hopeless as you think you are, you just can't bring yourself to believe it, too. A few days in a week not so long ago there were innumerable tiny and large sadnesses that hung in the air around me like flies and clung to my skin at night and when I awoke I discovered they hadn't been flies at all, but mosquitos, and they sucked everything out of me while I was sleeping.

(6)

I spent all of Saturday looking at things, and while that may not sound so enormous to most in the end it was an elephant for me. Another thing people forget about being young is that sometimes you expect more of yourself than the grownups do, and maybe it was always unreasonable to have even the wish that I could do all those same impressive things like those people– But scratch that, it wasn't a wish, it was a want, and from the age of three you always know there's a difference. Then again, the line is blurred upon which I stand: Do I wish I could do what those people did, or do I want to do what those people did? I'm barely a blip in time and already I'm in a canyon, looking up and to the sides, trying to decide which way to go.

(7)

I bet inside all of this is a life lesson, and I suspect that I already know what it is, but knowing something and having learned it are two very different things.

(8)

I can't really say I wish I were Peter Pan, because I'd hate to be stuck at this age forever. I'm more of a Holden Caulfield, really. Even though I already know it I want someone to tell me how it'll all be okay in the end.


End file.
